Date of Birth: 15th July 1911

Place of Birth: Tomanoole, Gorey, Co. Wexford

Date Interviewed: 2nd September 2009

Summary: Margaret Doyle was a child at the time of the 1916 Easter Rising and the civil war and has lived through 2 world wars. She remembers how she and her friends would walk barefoot to school and says that boys also wore skirts to school! Her mother cooked over an open fire and they used paraffin lamps for lighting. Margaret has clear memories of the troubled times of the civil war period and shares some frightening incidents. She was admitted to Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin for an appendix operation in 1921 and remembers the windows being shot out by republicans. In October 1922 her father brought her to a relative’s funeral in Enniscorthy but when they got there the streets were full of soldiers and they were told that 2 men had been shot. Once soldiers came to the family farm, terrifying Margaret and her sister, and when they left they took all their eggs and butter. Another incident involved men threatening to shoot her father. Margaret has been involved in farming all her life and married a farmer who was related to one of the men killed in the Enniscorthy shootings.